The missing hours of crisis

By Alan RamseyMay 3 2003

Kim Beazley has been dudded. He has not helped himself, and you can be sure old Labor colleagues like Laurie Brereton and Paul Keating won't ever help him either, but Maxine McKew and some hysterical newspaper reporting have done the large man from Perth fairly thoroughly in the eye. Politicians should beware of ladies who lunch. ("That ain't no lady, that's that woman from The Bulletin.")

Understand how the media work.

Some of us in Canberra have been arguing since last September, increasingly more volubly, that Simon Crean's leadership is a corpse still upright mainly because a despairing and irrelevant Labor Party has no idea how and with whom to replace him. If ever there was a political leader out of his depth in a job utterly beyond him, it is poor old Simple Simon, a trier who has not any, and never did. Crean got the leadership under a selfish factional system that locked everyone else out. He is kept there, largely, by the pettiness and self-interest of various insiders, all with their own agendas and/or influence over an increasingly meaningless party pie.

But the Canberra press gallery by and large does not think for itself. It reacts. And over the accumulating months that Crean's desperate image as a leader with no standing, no authority, no presence, no passion and no electoral credibility became obvious to anyone who didn't have his or her head buried, the gallery soaked up Crean's absurd excuses and looked elsewhere for political "news".

And that's the point. Someone (or something) within the political process has to create "leadership turmoil" around a visible target, not just an opinion. The media loves leadership conflict. But a sinking leader is not "real" news until the media can put a name to a challenger. Crean has moaned since Christmas about anonymous internal destabilisation. It is a defence, however absurd, that obscured reality. The reality is that overwhelmingly the most effective force destabilising Crean's leadership is his own useless, lifeless performance ever since he got the job.");document.write("

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Until two weeks ago, it was also a defence mostly accepted by a gullible media. But then Sol Lebovic, the founder and managing director of the Newspoll organisation, and Maxine McKew took a hand.

Who did what and when is like the chicken and the egg. It's important to get the order right. When you do, Beazley's supposed deliberate stalking of Crean looks more the product of a bit of Beazley bumbling and loose language as well as some cute media presentation. Two and two do not always make four, however simple the arithmetic might seem.

Lebovic's opinion poll on preferred Labor leadership was published by The Australian on Tuesday, April 15. Its front-page story made the heroic claim that voters were "clamouring" for Beazley to regain the leadership "with almost four times as many voters supporting him over Simon Crean". McKew's lunch interview with Beazley was published in The Bulletin eight days later - on Wednesday, April 23, though the magazine carried, as usual, a fudged date of April 29 - the day after the Anzac Day long weekend.

And the McKew interview was even more brazen than The Australian's leadership poll story eight days earlier. It was presented under the headline strap, "The Labor crisis", and introduced her article like this: "ALP powerbrokers are taking notice. Kim Beazley is the Labor voters' choice to topple John Howard, and in this interview he tells Maxine McKew why Simon Crean has been so unsuccessful, how our involvement with the US over the Iraq War should have been handled, and why he's tough enough to take on John Howard."

Rewind and examine both stories.

The Australian claim of "voters clamouring" for Beazley was complete humbug. Told the names of seven Labor MPs, 1200 people telephoned by Newspoll preferred Beazley 36 per cent to Crean's 10 per cent, with the five others (Jenny Macklin, Kevin Rudd, Mark Latham, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner) trailing, in that order.

Thus 64 per cent - or two-thirds, or two in every three - of the 1200 "clamoured" for someone other than Beazley, including half who had no idea at all. So the "clamour" for Beazley was a very little clamour: 3 voters in every 10, according to the opinion of 1200 people. And the second-biggest vote was the 33 per cent Newspoll recorded as "uncommitted" - that is, don't know/don't care/bugger off and stop annoying me.

As for the McKew interview on "the Labor crisis" published eight days later, it began like this: "First impressions? Iceberg roses and chocolate cake. The latter is home-baked and cooling in the kitchen as Susie Annus [Beazley's wife] picks white roses from the cascading bushes that frame the front of the Beazley bungalow in South Perth. Mr 43 per cent is on the front veranda on the mobile.

"Given the time difference, the east coast network has been phoning from early morning with the latest Newspoll results. One in four Labor voters prefers Kim Beazley to Simon Crean.

"That's nice, but as Kim says, 'I've had my chance'. Nonetheless, he will talk, on the record, for close to four hours - about leadership, about the US alliance and about beating Prime Minister John Howard. He's already worked out his pitch. 'If I was running a Labor Party campaign now, I'd run on the word respect ..."' And on and on. All in the general, nothing specific. McKew plumbed her story from lines like, as she puts it: "I'd run on respect - very interesting use of the personal pronoun there, wouldn't you say?" How cute. Her article was larded with similar generalised expressions, followed by McKew's own interpretative comments.

Very clever indeed.

This was no more an interview on "the Labor crisis" than the twiz of a horticultural lesson on white roses or a recipe for chocolate cake. The interview had been agreed weeks earlier. It was supposed to be, as it mostly was, about the ins and outs of foreign and defence policy, Beazley's great passion. That's why he agreed. Despite the hype introducing the article and McKew's own interpolations and innuendo, it had nothing to do with "the Labor crisis". Nothing whatever.

McKew wrote that Beazley talked "on the record, for close to four hours". Her article might - might - have included five or six minutes of direct quotes, mostly on Beazley's foreign policy views. What happened to the other three hours and 55 minutes of "on the record" conversation nobody knows. What we do know is there wasn't a direct quote anywhere on "the Labor crisis". Why? Because when the interview actually took place, there wasn't one. Well, no more than had been around Crean's leadership carcass for six months but which, until the Newspoll survey, excited no general media interest.

It only became a "crisis" when The Australian published its leadership poll on April 15 insisting voters were "clamouring" for Beazley. Except McKew's interview occurred the day before the poll's publication turned it into a media-created "crisis", while her article, embracing the poll findings, was not published until nine days after the interview. That's why McKew's article talked about Beazley as "Mr 43 per cent".

What the 43 per cent refers to was the number of Labor voters, as distinct from all voters (36 per cent), in the 1200-person Newspoll sample who preferred Beazley as Labor leader. But 43 per cent of what? The survey had Labor with 34 per cent support among respondents (less 4 per cent "uncommitted" and 3 per cent "refused") compared with the Government's 46 per cent. So "Mr 43 per cent" was 43 per cent of 34 per cent of 1200 voters, less 7 per cent who had no idea or wouldn't say.

That is truly a tiny "clamour".

This is not to say Labor's leadership is not the despair of its 92 federal MPs or party rank and file. Nor that the media have not had an absolute picnic at Beazley and Crean's expense. Nor is it to argue Beazley is not a serious leadership rival. But Beazley will not challenge, and Crean, if he means what he says, will not stand down. They do not even talk to each other.

Labor is in a terrible bind. No one else has near enough caucus support to challenge. Yet a clear majority of his colleagues, I'd assert, believe Crean cannot lead them into government, no matter what the circumstances, while the fear of God is beginning to take hold that his continued incumbency can only mean another election debacle.

And I do mean debacle.

Nor is it any good others pretending leadership is not Labor's core problem. Maybe. But unless a political party has a credible public face, then all the ideas and policy initiatives in the world are useless. Modern politics is the captive of television. It makes or breaks parties because it makes and breaks leaders who cannot sell an effective message or a compelling image. You only have to look at Labor's electoral dominance in all states and territories to know Crean and his claque of selfish allies are a lost cause.

Maybe Labor does need another absolute thumping by voters to get the message of what the cancer of factionalism and internal back-scratching has done to its standing after 13 years of the high life of government.

After all, when people like the broadcaster Alan Jones start spruiking, as he did this week, that Crean isn't really Simple Simon but a leader of courage and "ticker" that had been "rarely shown" by Beazley during his six years of leadership and two election defeats, then Labor should realise things truly are crook.

An early double dissolution cannot be dismissed as fantasy. Nobody wants Simon Crean to remain Labor leader more than do John Howard and Peter Costello. Nobody. Not even Martin Ferguson.